News and Events

There is a workshop organized by the ATLAS USTC group regularly each year. Could you please tell us a bit about it: what are the aims of this event, who can participate?

This annual workshop started 4 years ago. At a very beginning we have around 10 PhD students, so not that many as we are now. One of the main purposes was to establish communication between students. The second important aim was to summarize results at the end of the year. Additionally, you might see we have quite tight time limits to reports: 20 minutes for senior students and 10 minutes for junior students. So this report is good training for the ability to summarize your work in the limited number of slides and time. Finally, we want to have an evaluation of each student work. Generally, all faculties and students are welcome to participate in this workshop. We especially put this event to the CERN end of year break so our members who are working in CERN can travel back to China and we have as many people in person as possible. It improves the efficiency of the workshop.

Now we can compare the very first workshop with the last one. Do you see any differences?

Apart from the increase of participants by at least factor of 2, there are a few other important points. In 2015 there was a bit different period in terms of main directions in ATLAS physics analysis program. There were more studies related to Standard Model, while now ATLAS focus moved to Higgs boson properties studies and New Physics searches. So we can say we have a larger spread of topics on this year workshop. Our group is growing now, we have new professors in the department and it leads to an increase in research diversity.

Can we say now that Higgs Physics and searches beyond the SM are now focused on USTC group studies?

Yes and no. Since there were no signs of New Physics found so far, so people started to return back to SM measurements, for example, me. In my studies, I am currently starting from the very beginning and look at fundamental parameters of SM such as a mass of W and Z bosons or mixing angle. By the way, these studies also can provide clues on where to search for New Physics. From my point of view, it would not be possible to find New Physics until 2025, when High luminosity LHC program is going to start. During Run 3 we will have twice more data than in Run 2. But currently, we see no significant discrepancies with SM in hundred studied channels. It makes me feel skeptical that this increase in statistics at least in Run 3 will help.

Talking about New Physics and the future of LHC. There is a proposal for 100 km collider, which will replace current LHC. Do you think this machine will be able to find something new?

Such a new machine will be definitely helpful and this is very meaningful especially for the Chinese community since our country could be a host place for this collider. From the pure physics point of view, we all support this effort and idea of our leaders that such big project will help to form a strong group of physicists in China, such as exists in CERN now.